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A New Musical Term in Ancient Mesopotamian Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2014
Extract
The fragment of Mesopotamian music lexicography published here was identified in the tablet collection of the Babylonian Section of the University Museum, Philadelphia, during a search for certain Sumerian literary fragments. It is offered to Oliver Gurney since it supplements the text of Nabnitu XXXII of whose major source he is the copyist and pioneer decipherer. Furthermore, the new musical term revealed by the text here may have a bearing on the treatise for the tuning of the Babylonian harp published by Professor Gurney in a previous number of this journal.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1981
References
1 I am grateful to the curators of the collection, Profs. Sjöberg and Leichty, for permission to publish the fragment.
2 = U 3011, published as no. 126 in Ur Excavation Texts (UET) 7 (1974)Google Scholar.
3 “An Old Babylonian Treatise on the Tuning of the Harp”, Iraq 30 (1968), 229–233 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also D. Wulstan, ibid., 215–228, and Kümmel, H.-M., Orientalia n.s. 39 (1970), 252–263 Google Scholar. A comprehensive and reasoned interpretative survey of Mesopotamian and Ancient Near Eastern music is given by Kilmer, A. D. in PAPS 115 (1971), 131–149 Google Scholar.
4 For LA cf. Fossey, C., Manuel d'assyriologie 2, 2905 Google Scholar ( Poebel, , BE 6/2 44: 6, Samsuiluna 14Google Scholar); for UH2 cf. ibid. 25620 ( Poebel, , BE 6/2 23: 30, Samsuiluna 4Google Scholar) and other forms there of the same and earlier periods; for ŠA, cf. ibid. 23436 ( Thureau-Dangin, , TCL I 133:4, Samsuiluna 11Google Scholar); for HI, cf. Poebel, op. cit. 12:29 (Hammurapi 42), and 41:4 (Sam-suiluna 13); for BU cf. Fossey, op. cit. 24491 ( Poebel, , BE 6/2 12: 25, Hammurapi 42Google Scholar), 24495 (Poebel, ibid. 55: 4, Samsuiluna 21) and earlier forms cited there; for GAR cf. Fossey, op. cit. 34522 ( Poebel, , BE 6/2 23: 12, Samsuiluna 4Google Scholar); the RU (obv. 2′) is incomplete but the traces can be compared with forms from the time of Hammurapi and Samsuiluna given in Fossey, op. cit. especially 4400, 4407 and 4417.
5 Cf. Goetze, A., RA 52 (1958), 137–149 Google Scholar.
6 Cf. An. Or. 42 3 n. 59, p. 12 topGoogle Scholar.
7 For example, the Middle Babylonian glass formula text, cf. An. Or. 42 3 n. 225, p. 44 Google Scholar.
8 It must be admitted that the Old Babylonian treatise for the tuning of the harp uses embūbum (see below); nevertheless, the distribution described still holds.
9 The reading ˹ti˺-˹tu 2˺-ur resulted from the interpretation of damaged signs and was questioned by AHw 1363b (6). The tablets itself has been returned to Baghdad and could not be consulted by the present writer. However, a collation was successfully effected by means of an outstanding transparency of the tablet provided by A. D. Kilmer in Berkeley in November, 1977.
10 AHw 1034a, “Überdeckung, Gesamtfläche; ein Strauch”.
11 Cf. n. 3 above; the copy is republished as no. 74 in UET 7.
12 uhrâm is normalized from uh 2-ri-a-a[m]; I take such writings as a sort of qerê perpetuum of Old Babylonian orthography whereby an old, uncontraded form such as uhri'am (or uhrī'am) is combined in writing with a living, uncontracted literary form uhrâm, where the contracted vowel length is clearly represented by the -a-am sequence. That is, the word is written with the shell of its older form but with the vowels of its living literary form. Several lines above, in line 6′, the scribe rather inconsistently simply wrote a spoken form uhrêm (adverbial accusative). This qerê perpetuum can be clearly demonstrated by comparing the various copies found in situ of the great Yahdunlim foundation inscription, where some ‘archaizing’ exemplars are written in the ‘ra-bi-am’ style, while other ‘modernizing’ exemplars give ‘ra-ba-am’ spellings; cf. Dossin, G., Syria 32 (1955), 1 ff., and ‘apparat critique’, 18 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 18′: za-ku-ta-am; 19′: te-ni-ma.
14 The first by Gurney, , Iraq 30 (1968), 230 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the second by Kümmel, , Orientalia n.s. 39 (1970), 255, n. 3Google Scholar.
15 AHw, 1004b (8).
16 ŠL 545 18, 19, 42 fGoogle Scholar.
17 Šulgi B 161 Google Scholar, text from MS. of G. Haayer, courtesy of The Sumerian Dictionary, University Museum, Philadelphia; cf. Studi Semitici, 42, 46 Google Scholar.
18 Šulgi E 34 Google Scholar, var. šu 4-šu 4, text from MS. of J. Klein, courtesy of The Sumerian Dictionary, University Museum, Philadelphia.
19 Šulgi C (b) 78′; var. šu 4-šu 4 here, as in the variant quoted above in note 3, is a non-phonemic ‘homophonic’ variant; text from MS. of J. Klein as above.
20 Cf. Krecher, J., SKly 22, 30 Google Scholar, with previous literature. It may be noted in passing that the Akkadian equivalent of this term, kīlum, “finale”, ought to be separated from its apparent homophone kīlum, “imprisonment”, and not lumped together as AHw 476 and CAD K 369. On Comparative Semitic grounds the etymon of the former is *kly while the latter's is *kl'. The separation of the two verbs in Akkadian, kalûm (*kly), “to cease”, and kalûm (*kl'), “to detain”, on other than semantic grounds is difficult, if only because of the a-vowel of the ventive morpheme. However, semantic considerations suffice in spite of some crossing-over in the vocabularies. In Hebrew some slight falling together or orthographic confusion occurs (cf. Held, M., JCS 15 (1961), 19 Google Scholar), but in Ugaritic both verbs are distinct (cf. J. Aistleitner, Wörterbuch der Ugaritisehen Sprache, n. 1311 and n. 1317).